Well it's very hard to estimate at which point a certain skill level has it too difficult. There are so many factors. How many villagers do you have to protect? How long is the needed wall? What kind of enemy units are coming? How many? How do you define that certain skill level? It's the classic "it depends". I strive to make videos which you can apply in all situations and give you the tools and foundation to better independently determine your situation. You could make criteria and define different skill levels accordingly and then compare them in several different scenarios with all of these varying factors. I could make a 20 minute video and it's stuff more fit for SotL material, you know. (That's not to say I might not make longer videos in the future if people really want me to do it) As for hotkeys, it's very fluid. I know I have made specific hotkey references in earlier videos and in those videos I have a short disclaimer in the beginning of the video. Sure there are defaults, at least three of them. I don't even know or use the DE default. I use my own custom which is based mostly on the HD default. Hotkeys are best according to individual preference but you can't get around that using hotkeys is indeed a big deal. While making hotkey specific references make it more down to earth sure, at the same time it's something so many people have different and I have also had viewers asking me of the opposite thing, that is that I don't give hotkey specific references. As for this being a lacking how-to and not having enough steps, I could have explicitly said select villager and place tiles like so and so but I omitted those details for the benefit of other details I thought more important to explain in the context. There is already extensive material out there on why you need to take a boar and gather rates and so on so I didn't spend any time talking about those things in the boar video. However I couldn't really justify for myself skipping this layer here since a new player would probably get quite confused by the two different foundations which are completely identical visually but have all the difference in the world between them in the endeavour of quickwalling. Thank you for your feedback! I appreciate it Edit: a foundation is initiated as soon as the building is at anywhere above 0%, that is one villager hitting it once is enough. Good that you pointed that detail out! I didn't think of mentioning it

@@Hjoerleif Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I appreciate you not just dismissing it as picking holes in your video! I was trying to identify and quantify what I felt was missing from the video, but I could not put my finger on it. I agree with your reasoning on each of the things I suggested, I was throwing out suggestions but none of them would have really added that bit I was trying to figure out. I think the difference between this and the boar lure video, for instance, is that after watching the boar lure video I felt I understood both why and how to boar lure, and how to achieve it in my gameplay, whilst after this I felt I understood why quickwalling was a useful skill and what elements I needed, but not really how I could actually get it done when playing with the enemy closing in. Maybe it's that with the boar lure you showed the most likely issue a player would face and how to mitigate that (villager death and garrisoning), whereas quickwalling doesn't really have the same common mistake and easy to explain mitigation strategy, beyond "you're not quick enough" and "you need to get quicker"?

@@Hjoerleif That comment took me three tries to write, and posting and editing between paragraphs, to get it sent, as I kept accidentally closing the dropdown and/or navigating to a different page due to youtube not having a check when you have an unposted comment, hence me now commenting again in case you only saw half

@@rich_2739 11 I feel you with the comment struggle, I'm on phone myself. Yes a boar lure is an exception to the usual 'it depends'. Almost everything about it is a constant. There is always a TC. There is always one luring villager. There are always receiving villagers. The boar lure is an event specific thing which consistently always happens every game at around 5 minutes into the game, no matter the map, no matter the civ. Because of this reliable consistency of situation you are in when you do this you can afford to be very specific and straightforward with explaining how to do it and still have it always apply. Quickwalling is much more situation dependent. It doesn't have to be a woodline you want to protect, it could be a gold pile, a stone pile, or any other particular area for any particular purpose. It doesn't matter if you use one villager or several villagers. It doesn't matter what building you use to quickwall if your eco can justify it and it gets the job done (see eg. Hera's famous market quickwalls). These are variables which are dependent on the particular situation you're in. And as such, the more useful I want this kind of short video to be for more people - paradoxically, the less specific I have to be regarding variables which are not constants in all situations.

@@Hjoerleif That makes a lot of sense. I think with a lot of things in AoE, I know that I don't know them and need to learn if I want to get better. I thought I understood quickwalling but just wasn't able to do it, and it's reassuring to hear that it is tougher than I thought and has a lot more moving parts. Maybe some kind of a "this is an advanced skill, don't expect to be able to master it right away" would be good in the video or description?

YES PLEASE, if someone knows of one reply to this comment!

In Definitive Edition you hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel by default. It can be changed in hotkeys options.

Quickwalling isn't necessary to play or win the game. It can prove useful and helpful if you can eg. save some villagers with it. But it was also nerfed in the November update so it's not as strong as it used to be.